As usual, a big +1 for @gdnrbob! I have had Vandersteen's for about 30 years now and every model has been biwired as Richard is quite insistent on it if you want to fully realize the beauty of his designs. If you do biwire, use the same cable geometry for the mid/treble and the bass.
To Bi Wire or not to Bi Wire that is the question?
Just brought home a new pair of KEF R3 bookshelf speakers. This is my first pair of serious speakers. So far I'm pretty happy, but I'm still breaking them in. After listening for a while I decided to research the bi wire option. I did a bunch of reading on the subject, the opinion seems to be 50 /50, so I decided to try it for myself. Immediately I heard a difference, the mid range was more pronounced and the low frequencies were deeper and tighter. I'm not sure about the high frequencies, they were pretty good to begin with.To make sure I wasn't imagining this, I asked my wife to listen, she said it sounded richer (her words). I only used 12 awg wire I had laying around, but if I like this better, I'll invest in some money in more serious cable. I thought I would put this out there and see what other peoples experiences were.
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This is a well travelled repeating post theme over the last 15 years here on AGON here is a very brief selected sample ....all with the same conclusions. roll up your sleeves and do your research here on AGON and other audio forums. (1) it is entirely system dependent.... and until you actually do an A-B bake-off... you won’t know. (2) Some speaker manufacturers indeed do favour them (Vandersteen ....) but some of the top cable manufacturers (CHORD, NORDOST....) are opposed . Without prejudice to the effects that the absolute benefits are always system dependent, a large chunk of the high-end quality build brands are moving away from bi-wiring in favour of shotgunned runs and jumpers. Biamping ... Different story. E.g. NORDOST http://www.nordost.com/downloads/NorseJ ... ctions.pdf CHORD http://www.chord.co.uk/help-and-informa ... ngle-wire/ ".... Many hi-fi and home cinema loudspeakers have two pairs of binding posts. This allows the speaker to be either bi-wired using two sets of loudspeaker cable or bi-amped using two amplifiers. As a general rule (and there will always be exceptions) we tend to find that bi-wiring will open out the sound stage and increase perceived levels of detail. However, single wiring will often sound the most musically coherent. There is also an issue with single and bi-wire speaker cables. In all the research we have carried out, a single wire speaker cable out-performs a bi-wire cable of equivalent cost. This makes a lot of sense; the single wire speaker cable has two high quality conductors and the bi-wire cable requires four. So for a given budget, we believe that a single wire cable will always out-perform the equivalent bi-wire cable, so much so that we no longer produce dedicated bi-wire cables..." (3) Thus there is no silver bullet one size fits all answe ..... full stop. https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/2-runs-of-wires-or-1-run-w-jumpers https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/speaker-jumpers-same-brand-as-speaker-cables/post?highlight=B... https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/to-biwire-or-not-to-biwire-that-is-the-question?highlight=Biw... https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/should-i-bi-wire-or-use-jumpers?highlight=I%2Bwire |
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